My Running Journal, 020210

Today was the first day of the rest of the training schedule. Not a rest day, but a run day. 1.5 miles is all. I charted a route around my house that was 1.7 or 1.8 miles according to Google Maps, so I figure that I met the goal of 1.5 miles.

Up before the alarm at 0550something, out of bed by 0610. I loitered in bed for a bit, thinking about what I am getting myself into as far as planning on running a marathon. stretched a little, massaged my feet, got up, and got rolling. My left foot hit the deck and I was off running by 0625.

Right now I'm keeping a loose idea of how fast I am going. I anticipate that I will finish the Marathon in about four hours. Because I plan on being a slow poke.

Back in the day (as in, in my late teens/early twenties) when I was in the Corps, I was a serious sandbagger when you put me out on the road to run. Not that I was out of shape - far from it, but I wasn't trained as a runner. I grew up doing Tae Kwon Do and then Gymnastics – neither of which really push for true endurance beyond a basic workout. I was a sprinter and fast twitch sort of guy. Running more than 400 yards felt like absolute murder to me. I grew up in the D.C. area, near the Potomac. Washington D.C. is built on a swamp, and like every other city on the East Coast south of, say, Portland Maine, the summers are incredibly hot and muggy. Moving fast in hot weather is, well, gross. So I didn’t do it.

When I got in the Corps, I had already broken and dislocated one ankle and severely sprained the other in gymnastics. Being a teenager meant that I didn’t follow the PT advice that I undoubtedly got, and so my ankles were in terrible shape. Pounding from the gymnastics, even though I was landing on mats, had dropped my arches, and to top it all off I have duck feet – EEE is the width for me, not that I knew that then.

So when I got to Boot I was issued boots and shoes based on five seconds on a foot measuring device and the number that I thought I was. Unfortunately for me, Boot Camp was not the place, evidently, to learn good running habits or how to correctly size footwear. I grew to really dislike running. Whereas I disliked it before, once I started having to run more than 400 yards at a time, I really discovered what it was like to have messed up ankles, feet and poor running habits.

They don’t really coach you in Boot Camp. They motivate you for sure, but they don’t coach you. No one sat down with the Platoon at any point and said “Recruits, today we are going to observe each and every one of you running. And then we will teach each recruit what the recruit is doing wrong, or can improve on.” Nope, it’s “RUN!”

I could have trained myself to run properly after getting out of Boot Camp, but the desire to do so never surfaced – I could run my PFT and feel like crap at the end of it, which was acceptable. I stayed in “shape,” but running never became a habit or an enjoyable activity. It hurt, it was tiresome, and I never felt rewarded by it. Truck it or Fuck it.

One of the things that I wasn’t clearly taught was pacing myself. I understood it on an intellectual level, but all of the sports leading up to my entry in the Corps had dealt in explosive, immediate power. Put all of the effort out, all at the same time. Which meant that I could run a sub-six minute mile, and then collapse from the effort.

I have been trying to learn to pace myself. And it is really, really hard to do. All of the intense physical activity that I did as a kid is getting in the way of building endurance. I have to re-train part of myself to learn to move in an efficient way, and that the distribution of my energy needs to be spread out over tens of minutes to hours, and not seconds or minutes in furious pace. I’m terrible as conservation.

This morning I probably ran at about a 7 minute a mile pace – I can’t believe that I was going any faster, but my watch showed 0625 when my left foot hit the deck, and 0635 when I got back inside the house after reaching the starting point and walking a block. We’ll call it 1.5 miles in 9 minutes. Which, believe it or not, is probably too fast right now.